Last Night's Oscars Tour Bus Bit Underscored a Deep Divide

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Last Night's Oscars Tour Bus Bit Underscored a Deep Divide

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It probably seemed like a killer bit in the writers’ room—something David Letterman would have done, or even Andy Kaufman. Get a tour bus full of unsuspecting movie fans and tell them they’re going to get to see a special exhibit about the Oscars. Then: Surprise! After winding their way through a backstage labyrinth, they’re at the Oscars. For real! They genuflect before Denzel (as is appropriate and right), shake hands with Charlize, and host Jimmy Kimmel banters a little: Where are you from?, and so on.

The bit didn’t bomb, exactly. I laughed when Kimmel stole Jennifer Aniston’s sunglasses to give one of the tourists; I was glad Denzel Washington mugged along with the gag. But then Kimmel asked one of the tourists' names. And when she told him it was Yulree—rhymes with "jewelry"—Kimmel made it a thing. Said of her husband, "Patrick. That's a name." He’d made a similar crack about Best Supporting Actor winner Mahershala Ali’s name, asking the Moonlight co-star how his newborn daughter’s name could possibly live up to something so "exotic."

Names are convenient to make fun of, especially when you’re doing crowd work, but it’s too easy to fall into a trap: Patricks and Amys are normal; Mahershalas and Yulrees ain’t. And that weirdness made the tour bus bit the perfect appetizer for the night's grand finale, the Best Picture screwup. Both were unscripted moments, and both perfectly crystallized the subtextual tension of the long, long evening.

Burning Bridges With Jet Fuel

Until the tour bus gag, at least, the ceremonies had skewed decidedly toward can’t-we-all-get-alongism. "There’s only one Braveheart in this room, and he’s not going to unite us," Kimmel said in his opening monologue. "Black people saved NASA and white people saved jazz. That’s what we call progress." And later, this: "We don’t discriminate against people based on what country they come from. We discriminate based on their age and weight." These are jokes at the expense of Hollywood—a tradition at the Oscars at least since the days Johnny Carson officiated.

If you’re on the money side of Hollywood (it's show business, after all), you want the Oscars to be about artistry and emotions, not how much Meryl Streep hates Donald Trump. Otherwise you lose half your audience to The Walking Dead and NCIS: Los Angeles and anything else that's on at the same time.

The tour-bus gag changed that, largely because it was impossible to figure out who the audience was and who the performers were. Was Kimmel passing these "average Americans" through the world’s most expensive celebrity zoo to gawk at the preternaturally beautiful creations and creators of popular culture? Or were the tourists themselves on display: people from flyover states whom Hollywood targets with products and occasional political tirades without really understanding who they are? Kimmel’s name joke didn’t help. It made the tourists—and by extension, the rest of us in the audience—seem like the butt of the joke.

Hollywood has never prided itself on being in touch with the working class, even when the movies were sometimes about poverty. Hollywood was always supposed to be a thing people wanted. The money, the fame, the power: The Oscars are where we got to see the people from the movies, playing characters based on themselves. We’re supposed to want to be them, or have sex with them. So when a smart writer like John Robb tweets that the ceremony was an “amazing example of ultra-orthodox cultural neoliberalism” that was “pure jet fuel for #trumpism?” I think he's saying that to the millions of people who voted against the pop-cultural elite alliances they saw in Hillary Clinton’s campaign, the Oscars aren't aspirational. They're an insult.

These movies aren’t about elites. Yet the cultural shifts at the core of their stories get celebrated on the coasts and denigrated in the exurbs.

Our relationship with the icons of culture has changed, refracted through our politics. At the Oscars, the people who made those movies look out of touch in their Harry Winston jewelry and blue velvet dinner jackets. When they declaim a wall on the Mexican border, or quote the Koran, it sounds naïve, even insulting, to a good-sized number of people. Somehow not even movies about the emotional pain of working class Massachusetts townies or tough modern Texan cowboys shooting it out against the backdrop of economic disaster could get over that hump.

After last year’s #oscarssowhite debacle, it finally seemed like the Academy was honoring stories about people who often feel invisible. And make no mistake: those movies—about gay African Americans, beautiful millennials aspiring to fame in the arts, and African American mathematician women fighting for equal treatment—aren’t about elites. Yet the cultural shifts at the core of their stories get celebrated on the coasts and denigrated in the exurbs. They're stories about people who haven't had their stories told ... but somehow they made a whole bunch of other people feel invisible, too.

I’ve watched the Oscars live pretty much without fail for 35 years. I always felt like I imagine one of the tourists from the bus gag must have—I gawk at the dresses, scoff at the gaffes, track whether my assessments of the movies matches the mysterious Academy’s. I wished I was there.

But it turns out the view from inside the theater turns off as many people as it turns on. Sure, everyone hate-watches the Oscars. But now half of us hate the way the other half hates it, too. And the winner is: nobody.